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Apple’s Mac App Store has topped 100 million downloads in under a year

Apple has today announced that over 100 million apps have been downloaded from the Mac App Store, less than a year after it opened.

While it’s hard to judge the success of the Mac App Store on that figure alone, it’s undoubtedly an impressive-looking stat for the store which launched on 6 January this year.

In today’s announcement, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing says that “With more than 100 million downloads in less than a year, the Mac App Store is the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world.” It’s fair to say that there isn’t that much competition to benchmark it against as yet. While there have been a great number of mobile app stores released in the wake of Apple’s iOS store, desktop app stores are still relatively rare.

In the three and a half years since its launch, Apple says that the iOS app store has seen 18 billion downloads, at a current rate of 1 billion apps per month.

Compared to the iOS App Store, the Mac App Store’s download rate is minuscule. The iOS store topped 1 billion in just nine months. However, it’s perhaps not fair to directly compare desktop downloads with generally cheaper and more impulsive mobile downloads.